Blog 53

                                                          PEDs, The ITA, and Professional Tennis:
                  An Unconvincing and Largely Unnecessary Monitoring and Enforcement Mess
                                                                     By John Weston Parry, J.D.
 

Introduction

Jannik Sinner, the number one ranked male tennis player going into the United States Open, has placed a spotlight, once again, on the financially and politically charged issue of performance enhancements in spectator sports, both domestically and internationally. Professional tennis is a monitoring and enforcement mess by almost any rational measure, beginning with the threshold question of what should be considered an illegal or illicit performance enhancement.

The most recent controversy, involving professional tennis, has focused on Sinner. The outcome, so far, has been dominated by political and financial agendas. They are fueled by the sanctity of purportedly having fair spectator sports’ competitions. Yet, professional tennis, like many other spectator sports, is inherently unfair in terms of the financial supports and other advantages that accrue to those tennis players, who already are perceived as being the most successful and popular.
Not surprisingly, one major advantage star tennis players have is being able to dodge testing protocols, as well as harsh sanctions in the relatively rare situations in which they are tested and the results are positive. The rationalizations manufactured by those accused stars, their publicists, and lawyers about why those privileged athletes’ positive tests results are not blameworthy, as well as the rationalizations of the tennis organizations that ultimately decide whether and how to meet out punishments or to make punishments more like slaps on the wrist, are hard to swallow, especially by many of the other professional tennis players.

Very few in the non-player tennis world want to see Sinner prohibited from participating in major tournaments, including the U.S. Open, for the next year or two. Thus, it is convenient, and self-serving, for the International Tennis Integrity Agency (ITA) not to closely scrutinize the self-serving explanations by star players about why they should not be blamed, or blamed much less.   
Professional tennis has a long record of not only lax, but often duplicitous, testing protocols. A major problem has been that the tennis organizations tasked with PED monitoring and enforcement have political and financial agendas that have little to do with the welfare of all the athletes they are supposed to be representing.

Bottom line, monitoring and enforcement protocols in tennis are in desperate need of being revamped. They should be primarily designed to test for the use of PEDs that are actually harmful to athletes. Instead, these tennis organizations embrace testing protocols intended to catch only a small percentage of the many players, who regularly rely on these substances to help them perform more efficiently, as well as to aid them in their recoveries from the many different types of injuries that their intense training and competitions can produce.

It is a smoke and mirrors charade, which has gone on for decades, reprogrammed to have the public think everything is being done to make these competitions as fair as possible. However, when a situation like the one Jannik Sinner found himself embroiled in makes headline news, that façade quickly disintegrates under media scrutiny—but usually only for a short period of time—until the illusion of competitive fairness can be reprogrammed and reinstalled. If a star tennis player happens to be associated with an unpopular country, like Russian-American Maria Sharapova at the end of her superlative sports career, then the international tennis gods may try to camouflage their monitoring and enforcement biases and incompetence by imposing particularly harsh penalties in an isolated case, making that player their proverbial sacrificial lamb.

Jannik Sinner’s Slap on the Wrist

The sportswashed, intentionally hushed up and delayed narrative about Jannik Sinner’s two positive tests for the banned anabolic steroid Clostebol, which did not become public until several months after those doping incidents took place, is suspicious, if not an out and out cover up. The public is unlikely to ever find out the whole truth, unless new information is divulged by more thorough investigations.

The two fitness professionals, formerly on Sinner’s team for several years, who have been indirectly blamed for the so-called mistakes, have not spoken to the media. There also is no public statement from the ITA, which handled the investigation, indicating that as part of its investigation these two fitness professionals were thoroughly questioned, or even questioned at all, about their recollections of what actually happened.

Those two individuals are no longer with Sinner’s team because Sinner has blamed them for his two positive doping tests and the ITA concluded that this scenario, presented to them after the fact, was plausible. The public also does not know whether or not those two fitness professionals received substantial settlements to leave Sinner’s team without protest and whether they agreed not to contradict Sinner’s version of the story, as part of any settlement.

Clostebol is a Schedule III controlled substance in the U.S., but an over-the-counter topical skin treatment in Italy. Clostebol is the same substance Major League Baseball suspended San Diego Padres star Fernando Tatis 80 games for using. Like Sinner, Tatis claimed it was being used as a medicinal skin treatment, in his case for ringworm. Both Tatis and Skinner insisted they were totally unaware that Clostebol was in the ointments they had been placed on their bodies, which left trace amounts of the drug inside them when they were tested.

In Skinner’s case, he tested positive twice, far enough apart to strongly indicate that he had received at least two such illicit treatments. While the ITA asserts that each of Skinner’s positive test results showed only trace amounts of the steroid, there is no scientific guarantee that what remained in his system on those two occasions had not substantially dissipated over time, masking the true extent of any abuse. Furthermore, the results of those two tests do not preclude the possibility that Sinner may have been using the banned substance previously to build some muscle, since he obviously has had the competitive disadvantage of a considerably less powerful body type than Carlos Alcaraz or Novak Djokovic his main rivals in grand slam tournaments, such as the U.S. Open.

In addition, taking Clostebol would have been beneficial to help him recover from his nagging hip injury. Lastly, Sinner chose not to play in the Olympics where the World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA) administers drug tests, not the ITA. His coach expressed the opinion that the doping scandal had made Sinner too sick to compete. Thus, the coach implied, Sinner had pretended to be ill with a sore throat instead of being more forthcoming. While WADA, as the Russian doping fiascos demonstrates, can be incompetent, if not deceitful, in the manner in which it monitors and enforces anti-doping protocols, the ITA, as will be discussed below, has a consistent history over many years of being suspiciously lax, to the point of looking the other way or not at all when professional tennis stars are involved in alleged doping.    

Clostebol has been used as a popular performance-enhancement for a number of years. It should be crystal clear to sports trainers, fitness coaches, and professional, Olympic, and college athletes that even applying Clostebol as a skin treatment, much less using it to enhance athletic performances, is a serious infraction of the current rules of every major spectator sport, except maybe football, which is even more negligent in this regard than professional tennis.

Jannik Sinner’s claim that he was totally unaware that he was being treated medicinally with Clostebol, supposedly for a minor cut on his finger, is difficult to believe, even if it is plausible, given the fact that it would be beneficial to use that drug for an inflammatory injury like the lingering hip problem, which prevented Sinner from participating in a number of tournaments after he won the Australian Open. Evidence that has been made public so far may not be sufficient to justify further sanctions against Sinner.

Nevertheless, there are a number of unanswered questions that should, but probably will not, be investigated, regarding Sinner and his team’s actions, as well as the ITA’s seemingly preferential protocols when star tennis players’ positive test results place them in the crosshairs of illicit doping investigations. Getting to the truth should be a major priority for professional tennis, if integrity is really what the ITA is supposed to be all about.

Why would the ITA confiscate $325,000 in tournament revenues that Skinner earned for the period he had tested positive; then not release those funds back to him once he was supposedly cleared, if the ITA was completely convinced Sinner had done nothing wrong? The most rational conclusion is that the ITA felt his performance might well have been enhanced, but the evidence turned up in their incomplete investigation could not conclusively prove intent on Skinner’s part.

Professional Tennis and the ITA’s Woeful History of Anti-Doping Compliance Failures

Sinner and his team’s recent scandal is but one more regrettable doping controversy that has tarnished professional tennis. For a long time, there were almost no anti-doping protocols in that sport, much less aggressive enforcement. Players under suspicion seemed to disappear from tennis competitions when it appeared that the likelihood of their being tested might make it problematic for them, or the need to recover and train in secret, far from the public eye and testing mandates, might have become paramount.

In 2017, my research for The Athlete’s Dilemma: Sacrificing Health for Wealth and Fame (Rowman & Littlefield, 2017) revealed that

         [p]rofessional tennis arguably remains the least effective sport in terms [anti-doping] testing,              even worse perhaps than cycling or American football. Tennis’s testing protocols have been                  criticized as being halfhearted at best, even though athletes in that sport, both male and female,          have been bulking up, increasing their stamina and injury recovery times, being linked to                    performance-enhancing drug use [but] claiming publicly that they want closer scrutiny to                    identify cheaters…. If the IOC and WADA have been frequently overzealous, yet ineffective in              their enforcement protocols …, then professional tennis has been conspicuously underzealous             and ineffective.

With the exception of Maria Sharapova, who appears to have been the high-profile scapegoat tennis was looking for, underzealous and ineffective aptly described doping enforcement under the auspices of the newly formed [ITA]. As a New York Times headline proclaimed in early 2016, tennis ‘seems to operate in the dark [about performance-enhancing drugs.]

Put in a different way by Howard Bryant of ESPN the Magazine in 2013, when it comes to enforcement in tennis, “the fix is in.” Suspicions were rampant then that testing in professional tennis was
        mostly a sham…. Only a few marginal tennis players [were] ever identified as having doped. No          marquee player had failed a test for PEDs, which is reminiscent of the way football is now and             baseball used to be before selective testing was introduced.

In December 2015, Christopher Clarey, the esteemed tennis writer for the New York Times, described professional tennis as being roiled by PED suspicions and accusations. Rodger Federer and Andy Murray both opined then, much like certain players and former players today after the Sinner incident, that the ITA’s testing program lacked visibility, effectiveness, and fairness. 

Clarey astutely concluded the “idea of a federation administering doping tests to its own athletes and meal tickets has been flawed from the start.” Little has changed to suggest that the ITA’s monitoring and enforcement of PEDs in professional tennis, especially by its’ stars, has significantly improved, as the Sinner fiasco has demonstrated, once again.

PEDS and Substance Abuse and Dependency

The most troubling abuse of PEDs—or at least what should be viewed as the most troubling—occurs when repeated or long-term use creates an unhealthy and potentially destructive dependency on those drugs. In my most recent book, The Burden of Sports: How and Why Athletes Struggle with Mental Health (Rowman & Littlefield, 2024), I examined the issue of substance abuse and dependency, including “misuse of performance-enhancing drugs.” I wrote in part:

        Dependency due to withdrawal symptoms makes it much more difficult for… athletes… to                   substantially reduce or quit abusing a substance. Unfortunately, athletes, like other people, tend          to take more and more of these substances as their tolerance increases….

      While PEDs, as a class, do not necessarily lead to a substantially elevated risk of mental disorders 
      and behavior problems, two notable examples do: anabolic steroids—hence the term ‘roid                    rage’—and amphetamines and methamphetamines (meth), which are stimulants … known, in              certain cases, to produce paranoia, convulsions, hallucinations, and compulsive and repetitive             behaviors….

Dangerous physiological risks are associated with “long-term anabolic steroid use…including liver damage, stunted growth… and impotence.” In addition, there are mental health risks, such as “[d]epression, suicide, and psychotic behaviors….”

Amphetamines and methamphetamines (meth) “are stimulants that excite the central nervous system, making athletes more alert and less fatigued. They… make users falsely feel powerful strong, and motivated, all attributes that, if true, would make them practice and perform better,” or at least make them think this was so. The most celebrated tennis player to abuse this class of PEDs was Andre Agassi, beginning in 1997, as he detailed in “his autobiography, Open.”

The use of PEDS, if they should ever be permitted in professional tennis—as I recommend below—would need to be under the care and supervision of a trained physician, not the supervision of tennis players themselves or their team members. Without such medical oversight, the risks of abuse, leading to unhealthy outcomes would be unacceptably high.                 

Conclusion: A Largely Unnecessary Monitoring and Enforcement Mess

The sad reality, though, is that most of these disruptive PED controversies in professional tennis could be avoided, if the Association of Tennis Professionals (ATP) and the Women’s Tennis Association (WTA) changed their frames of reference, regarding what should be prohibited and monitored, or allowed with strict health-related restrictions. As long as every player has the option of choosing to use those PEDs that, if properly supervised, would not threaten their health, which in many cases would allow them to play better and longer—or at least benefit from the placebo effect of thinking that is the case—why should any non-harmful PED use be punished. Non-harmful and properly monitored PEDs would be no more, and probably less, of a competitive advantage than corporate sponsorships, other financial support mechanisms, more money to hire top notch professionals to maximize their fitness and performance, and tournament scheduling preferences, which star tennis players already have that the rest of the players lack.

​Obviously, the ATP and WTA and tournaments officials have a vested interested in maximizing the availability, and boosting the performance levels, of their cash cows. With a major recalibration of what should be deemed unfair going forward, players’ health can become the top priority, and all the players can be treated more equally on both the ATP and WTA tours. That would be a win-win formula for a vast majority of tennis professionals, as well as the public’s perceptions about professional tennis’ so-called integrity.